


Falling Stars

by inkpink



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Age Difference, Clove Cigarettes, F/F, French, Tattoos, Unhealthy Relationships, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 19:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10815372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkpink/pseuds/inkpink
Summary: "She touches you like you’re made of gold. Like you’re made of gold and soon, you will fall to time."





	Falling Stars

You’ve made many poor decisions in your life, but Kanaya Maryam is your favorite.

She’s an art critic, she tells you, smoothing the jade satin of her skirt so the fabric lies flat against the sheer black of her tights. You’re a college student, you tell her, and you pair the words with a docile snarl that demonstrates perfect knowledge of your own powerful inadequacy. Her response is more a friendly baring of teeth and a slick of jade lipstick than a smile. You like it.

She is four years older than you, and that is dangerous. You are are going to get hurt. Your heart will be ripped out. You have a perverse, clinical need to see it oozing under a microscope.

The second time you meet, your clothes carry the scent of candle smoke and lavender, and you hope she doesn’t smell the Faustian connotations drifting from your layers of black. You sit on railroad tracks, legs dangling off, and she tells you about an album she only sort-of liked between puffs on a clove cigarette. You believe with utter conviction that her smoke births nebulae. When she pulls back to tuck your tag in, you feel goosebumps prickle against her fingertips. Her gaze is so piercing as to carve you.

She drinks absinthe, which you find both precious and otherworldly, a strange green elixir to animate this alien of a girl stranded on Earth’s crust. You are convinced she must be from another planet. There’s something eerily familiar in the twine of her fingers around the stem of the glass though, something you don't want to be made aware of. She kisses like a pit viper. Just as easily, she swallows your objections whole.

She wears her nails long, green, and sharp, softly pointed as if to fashionably threaten permanent damage if trifled with. She takes her coffee black, and you can taste the horrible bitterness of it whenever she breathes in your direction. It’s tempting. It feels like an offer. It feels like a challenge.

Her left arm is laced with black ink, tattoos of fragile-winged insects, needle and thread, finite galaxies, and sharp teeth spilling from her shoulder to her wrist. Each one is from a different city, and you gawk at her worldliness when you think she isn’t looking. You are enamored with her as Copernicus to the stars.

In your spare time, you dice up your connection and pin it with terms. It would be optimistic to dub what you share a relationship. You wonder if Stockholm Syndrome necessitates that one member be physically captured, as opposed to merely snared by deep, green eyes and the inescapable smell of cloves. You debate whether it qualifies as codependency, the fact that your thoughts and actions are beginning to be organized around her. You’ve always been a bit obsessive, always had your vices, and it seems this girl is one of them.

She asks if your hair is natural and you respond yes, you’ve been towheaded since the day you and your twin brother fought your way into the world. She asks if you might let her dye it. Your returning _yes_ burns like a shot. Anything to keep a part of her there with you, something you can look at and designate hers.

Her color is green, she tells you, but the dye she’s streaking through your tresses is palest violet. A thrill races through you at the sight of it in the mirror, your face next to something so markedly hers. You want to belong to her.

She doesn’t ever give you her number, but she does give you magical things. She speaks beautiful French that you never tire of. You even learn a little for her, anything for attention. _En ta beauté gît ma mort et ma vie,_ you whisper, tripping over the strange consonants. She smiles softly and shakes her head.

She stains your lips coal black, sucking, swirling, vortex black, dark matter dripping from your cupid’s bow to the pillow of your lower lip. There’s a dual tenderness and ferocity present as she paints your face, and you press your freckles against her palm while she works. You nearly ruin the line of her cat eye, but it’s worth it to feel her hands on you, warm against your cheek. She makes you into a monster, a goddess, an alluring mix of the two that calls to mind Narcissus drowning in his own eyes. There’s a touch of the extraterrestrial clinging to your cheekbones - something otherworldly in the sharpness of the black against your skin. She’s cast you in her own mold. You tug at the hoops strung all up her ears, like Saturn’s rings, and decide it would be too telling to thank her.

You trace poetry across the planes of her tan skin, and she murmurs borrowed words in your ear. She touches you like you’re made of gold. Like you’re made of gold and soon, you will fall to time. She is speckled with birthmarks and freckles like rogue constellations. You are under the spell of the universe at large. Her eyes are black holes and her touch shooting stars. What you share is meteoric, a blaze in the darkness destined to end in destruction.

She has you model all of her newest works, and they fit, somehow. You’d be bewildered that she knows your size, if not for the knowledge that she’s spent hours with her hands all over you, mapping your body in fingertips. She’s a seamstress and Circe and she smiles like she knows full well.

She reads from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as you fall asleep, skipping the most chilling parts in favor of grinning at you because she is more frightening than anything a dead man could conjure. _There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights,_ she murmurs, voice pulling at the words and making them her own. The part that most terrifies you is how willingly you believe her.

Your characters begin to resemble her. You don’t recall Calmasis possessing any sort of aesthetic affinity, but now they have green eyes and sigh when famous painters are mentioned. It’s not constructive to plot, but neither is she. You are living in moments instead of a string of connected narrative, your life is painted in one-shots, and you are not as worried about it as you feel you should be.

She’s just sojourning, she assures you, and then it’s off to Paris.

In the meantime, you learn. You learn that you don't really like boys at all, that there is something more for you hidden in the sapphic. You learn that Kanaya will turn up in the strangest of places and wait, but only for so long. You learn how to play someone like an instrument, and that someone is Kanaya Maryam. You learn that she prefers live models, and you pose among her rumpled sheets for hours as she sketches you. You learn that you don't have to be naked with someone to feel exposed, don't have to sleep with them to feel vulnerable. You do both of those things, but you've felt vulnerable since the moment you set eyes on her. You learn that she loves the sunlight as surely as you do the moon, but that if you spend enough time with her out in its rays, you will sizzle and scorch. You learn to communicate through touch as surely as with words. She applauds you for being such a fast learner. She calls you her protégé and has no idea how much it feeds the childhood narcissism you never quite lost. You learn, eventually, that it’s time for her to go.

She doesn’t tell you that she’s leaving, but you see it in her eyes, and the way that she whispers she only wishes she had time to sketch you again. _Why don’t you stay?_ you nearly ask, before you remember that there are other girls like you who need to be whispered dead words and immortalized in charcoal.

_In your beauty resides my life and my death,_ she says, and you know it’s not a lie and you despise that, but you can’t help but crave more. A fishhook is tugging at the corner of her mouth and you don’t want her to feel sorry because you know she isn’t. This is not love. She is the laws of gravity, the stars overhead, what makes the Earth spin. The thought of leaving her orbit is incapacitating. The last time she kisses you, something inside you breaks.

You do not become a drug addict. You do not drop out of school. You carry on with life as is required of you, though you do upend another jar of dye over your head - rich, jade green - and sulk for four months. Amongst the body of moody English minors, your funk goes nigh-unnoticed.

You begin to read your poetry at coffeeshops, submit works to contests. You indulge in the cliche of leaving advice on the walls of bathroom stalls. You take to turning up in the strangest of places and waiting, but only for so long. You slick your lips with the blood of black holes. You foster your weakness for beautiful girls, and you tell them your color is lilac and your poison is vodka. You keep the sketch she made of you hidden in your closet. There’s a certain light shed upon you here, a sparkle in your gaze. The magic of Kanaya is hidden in this piece of oaktag.  


You visit Paris for your twenty first birthday, and you feel her among the bright lights and narrow alleyways. The stars are cloaked in smog. The air smells like smoke, and if you close your eyes, like cloves.

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing gets me like indie space lesbians


End file.
